The History of Reading

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

   PDF

2. Introduction

   1. Introduction

      • Shafquat Towheed, W. R. Owens

      Pages 1-12

3. Readers in the Medieval and Early Modern World

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 13-13

      PDF

   2. Speaking of Reading and Reading the Evidence: Allusions to Literacy in the Oral Tradition of the Middle English Verse Romances

      • John Ford

      Pages 15-31

   3. Modes of Bible Reading in Early Modern England

      • W. R. Owens

      Pages 32-45

4. Readers in the Enlightenment and Romantic World

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 47-47

      PDF

   2. Weeping for Werther: Suicide, Sympathy and the Reading Revolution in Early America

      • Richard Bell

      Pages 49-63

   3. Reconstructing Reading Vogues in the Old South: Borrowings from the Charleston Library Society, 1811–1817

      • Isabelle Lehuu

      Pages 64-83

5. Readers in the Nineteenth-Century World

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 85-85

      PDF

   2. Devouring Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Antebellum ‘Common’ Readers

      • Barbara Hochman

      Pages 87-100

   3. Reading in Polish and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Silesia

      • Ilona Dobosiewicz, Liliana Piasecka

      Pages 101-116

   4. Reading Science: Evidence from the Career of Edwin Gilpin, Mining Engineer

      • Lawrence J. Duggan, Bertrum H MacDonald

      Pages 117-132

   5. Reading in an Age of Censorship: The Case of Catholic Germany, 1800–1914

      • Jeffrey T. Zalar

      Pages 133-144

6. Readers in the Twentieth-Century World

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 145-145

      PDF

   2. Understanding Children as Readers: Librarians’ Anecdotes and Surveys in the United States from 1890 to 1930

      • Kate McDowell

      Pages 147-162

   3. Letters to a Daughter: An Archive of Middle-Class Reading in New Zealand, c.1872-1932

      • Susann Liebich

      Pages 163-177

   4. Books Behind Bars: Mahatma Gandhi’s Community of Captive Readers

      • Ian Desai

      Pages 178-191

   5. Remembering Reading: Memory, Books and Reading in South Africa’s Apartheid Prisons, 1956–90

      • Archie L. Dick

      Pages 192-207

7. Back Matter

   Pages 208-222

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Bringing together research from a variety of countries and periods, this volume introduces readers to the diverse approaches used to recover the evidence of reading through history in different societies, and asks whether reading practices are always conditioned by specific local circumstances or whether broader patterns might emerge.

• enlightenment
• identity
• literacy
• national identity
• Romanticism
• society
• Tradition

'This consequential volume extends our understanding of reading in time and space. Importantly, the book takes us into the colonial and postcolonial worlds, a dimension generally lacking in scholarship on histories of reading. The book offers a dazzling array of case studies - Gandhi in prison, Protestant Bible readers in early modern England, Polish nationalists, political prisoners in South Africa and many more. Each meticulously researched essay demonstrates that understanding how people read is a key dimension in any intellectual history. This book considerably extends the frontiers of scholarship on histories of reading, print culture and book history. Lucidly written, this treasure trove will delight anyone who loves books and reading.' - Professor Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

'This impressive collection of essays interrogates a remarkable range of surviving evidence of reading practices and experiences from the medieval to the modern. Here we have a series of intelligent and evidence-based investigations of one of the most debated topics in recent cultural history: the varying definitions and modes of reading. The sources used are as diverse as the places and ages of the study of reading, inviting extensive reconsideration of how and why people read and of our understanding of what women, men and children thought they were doing when they read. Comparative perspectives combine to refocus attention to questions of intensive and extensive reading, of the relationship between orality, writing and print, the changing nature of literacy (and different, contemporary and overlapping literacies), and the quest to find evidence of readers' responses. The great success of the collection is to bring forward this plethora of new historical case studies using memoirs, diaries, library circulation records, and marginalia and other textual clues to test both established historical interpretations and familiar theoretical assumptions in the history of reading.' - James Raven, Professor in Modern History, University of Essex, UK

'...by scoping out some important new directions for the history of reading, this volume points to a bright future...' -Library & Information History

• The Open University, UK

  Shafquat Towheed, W. R. Owens

Volume 1 RICHARD BELL Assistant Professor of History, University of Maryland, College Park, USA IAN DESAI Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in South Asian Studies and History, Yale University, USA ILONA DOBOSIEWICZ Professor of English Literature, Opole University, Poland ARCHIE DICK Professor in the Department of Information Science, University of Pretoria, South Africa LAWRENCE DUGGAN Librarian and Researcher, Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada SIMON ELIOT Professor of the History of the Book, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK JOHN FORD Maître de Conférences in English and Head of Department of Languages and Literature, Champollion University in Albi, France BARBARA HOCHMAN Associate Professor of Literature, Ben Gurion University, Israel ISABELLE LEHUU Professor of History, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada SUSANN LIEBICH Doctoral Candidate in History, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand BERTRUM H. MACDONALD is Professor of Information Management, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada KATE MCDOWELL Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA LILIANA PIASECKA Professor of Second Language Acquisition and Methodology of Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Opole University, Poland JEFFREY T. SALAR Historian of Modern German and Central Europe, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, USA Volume 2 SOPHIE BANKES Doctoral Student, The Open University, UK ADRIAN BINGHAM Senior Lecturer in Modern History, University of Sheffield, UK ROSALIND CRONE Lecturer in History, The Open University, UK SIMON ELIOT Professor of the History of the Book, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK DAVID FINKELSTEIN Research Professor of Media and Print Culture, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, UK LINDA FLEMING Postdoctoral Researcher for the Scottish Readers Remember Project, Edinburgh Napier University, UK CLARE GILL Doctoral Candidate in English, Queen's University Belfast, UK ANDREW HOBBS Postdoctoral Research Assistant, University of Central Lancashire, UK STEPHEN JACYNA Reader in the History of Medicine, University College London, UK MICHAEL LEDGER-LOMAS Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge University, UK ALISTAIR MCCLEERY Professor and Director of the Scottish Centre for the Book, Edinburgh Napier University, UK MARK TOWSEY Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History, University of Liverpool, UK ANNA VANINSKAYA Lecturer in Victorian Literature, University of Edinburgh, UK Volume 3 HANNA ADONI Sammy Ofer School of Communications Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Israel DANIEL ALLINGTON Lecturer in English Language Studies and Applied Linguistics, Open University, UK STEPHEN COLCLOUGH Lecturer in the School of English, Bangor University, UK MATS DAHLSTROM Associate Professor, Swedish School of Library and Information Science, Sweden SIMON ELIOT Professor of the History of the Book, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London KATE FLINT Professor of English and Art History, University of Southern California, USA SIMON R. FROST External Lecturer, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark ALAN GALEY Assistant Professor, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Canada HILLEL NOSSEK Professor of Communication, School of Media Studies, College of Management Academic Studies, Israel SADIAH QUREISHI Research Fellow, Cambridge Victorian Studies Group, University of Cambridge, UK JONATHAN ROSE Kenan Professor of History, Drew University, USA BARBARA RYAN National University of Singapore JOAN SWANN Senior Lecturer, Centre for Language and Communication, Open University, UK VERNON TOTANES Ph.D. Candidate, University of Toronto, Canada.

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